University of California at Irvine

Department of Physics

AENEAS SUPERCOMPUTER

Array of Enhanced Nodes Supercomputer


UC Irvine professors Herbert Hamber(left) and Donald Dabdub, are using the Linux operating system in conjunction with 64 computers running in parallel.
MARK BOSTER / Los Angeles Times

Hardware

The system is configured as one front-end system and 64 compute nodes.

Each of the 65 nodes in the system has:

  • Motherboard with Intel 440LX chipset and 300 MHz Pentium II processor
  • 128 MByte 10-ns SDRAM memory
  • 3.1 GByte Quantum EIDE U-DMA disk
  • 100 Mbit/s ethernet adapter
    •

    In addition, 2 100 Mb/s full duplex 36-port Fast Ethernet switches with 6.6 Gbit/s backplane and trunked Gigabit Ethernet fiber interconnect modules are used for communications between nodes.

    The machine has an aggregate peak performance of 19.5 GigaFlops, with 8.3 GigaBytes of memory and 221 GigaBytes of disk space.

    Aeneas was recently featured in an article in the business section of the Los Angeles Times. See also the recent article by Beth Riley in the UC Irvine Granteater. A close-up picture of the original 16-node machine, as well as of the new 64-node configuration, can be found here. More technical details about the machine and its physics goals can be found here (postscript document).

    Software

  • The machines run RedHat Linux .
  • EASY and DQS for job scheduling.
  • MPI-ch, lam-MPI or PVM for message passing
  • MPI is the de-facto standard for fast message passing in MPP systems.
  • Compilers for Gnu C, C++ and Fortran (g77)
  • Absoft's f77 and f90 compilers are also avaliable.
  • Highly optimized BLAS and FFT's for the Intel Pentium II.

    • A few limited benchmark results are available. For one real world application the system exceededed 1.3 GigaFlops sustained performance on 16 nodes (see text here ) and 4.1 GigaFlops on 64 nodes.

    Applications areas

    High Energy Physics simulations

    Numerical Quantum Field Theory

    High Energy data reduction

    Light scattering and surface physics modeling

    Astrophysical Simulations

    High temperature superconductivity

    Plasma Physics simulations

    Applied Mathematics research

    Computational Fluid Dynamics

    Climatic Rsearch and Atmospheric Chemistry

    Applications results

    Further related web pages:

    Faculty involved in the AENEAS Project:

    • Herbert W. Hamber, Physics
    • Hank Sobel, Physics
    • Alex Maradudin, Physics
    • Steve White,Physics
    • Liu Chen, Physics
    • Steve Barwick, Physics
    • Gary Chanan, Physics
    • Mike Holst, Mathematics
    • Donald Dabdub, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
    • Feng Liu, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
    • William Sirignano, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
    • Said Elghobashi, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
    • Hartmut Luecke, Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
    • Tom Poulos, Molecular Biology & Biochemistry

  • Virgil's Aeneid, describing the deeds of Aeneas, can be found here .

    • Last update 12/14/2000

    Herbert W. Hamber

    professor of physics

    hhamber@uci.edu

    My home page can be found here.

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